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Assessment of Approaches to Updating the Social Cost of Carbon Phase 1 Report on a Near-Term Update (2016) / Chapter Skim
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5 Discussions, Conclusions, and Recommendations
Pages 45-50

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From page 45...
... ;  overall SCC reliability;  alternative options for climate system representation; and  whether there is sufficient benefit to warrant investing limited available resources in conducting a near-term update to the SCC estimates, relative to investing those resources in lasting improvements to the methods and science underlying the SCC. CONCLUSION 1 The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)
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From page 46...
... NEAR-TERM ENHANCEMENT OF THE QUALITATIVE CHARACTERIZATION OF SCC UNCERTAINTY TO INCREASE TRANSPARENCY The third charge question directs the committee to consider ways to enhance the qualitative characterization of uncertainties associated with the current SCC estimates in the near term to increase the transparency associated with using these estimates in regulatory impact analyses. To be well defined, the SCC must be conditioned on certain variables, for example, the year in which the change in emissions is assumed to occur.
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From page 47...
... technical support document explicitly describes the factors on which the SCC is conditioned, such as the year emissions occur and the discount rate and also makes explicit the sources of distributions for various inputs. However, it does not detail all sources of model-specific uncertainty in the social cost of carbon integrated assessment models.
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From page 48...
... The executive summary of the technical support document and individual regulatory impact analyses that use the SCC might usefully provide a summary of this discussion. Reporting of Results In the executive summaries of the IWG's technical support documents, the presentation of SCC estimates and the description of the uncertainty underlying them are brief.
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From page 49...
... The guidance should also indicate that when uncertainty ranges are presented in an analysis, those ranges should include uncertainty derived from the frequency distribution of SCC estimates. To facilitate such inclusion, the executive summary of the technical support document should present symmetric high and low values from the frequency distribution of SCC estimates with equal prominence, conditional on each assumed discount rate.
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From page 50...
... The frequency distributions shown repr esent most o the 150,00 SCC e d of 00 estimates However, they do not represent the entire distr s. ribution.
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Key Terms

  • social cost
  • discount rate
  • discount rates
  • support document
  • temperature change

  • probability distributions
  • climate sensitivity
  • transient climate
  • regulatory impact
  • percent discount

  • equilibrium climate
  • mean surface
  • frequency distributions
  • impact analyses
  • support documents

  • frequency distribution
  • climate response
  • global mean
  • uncertain parameters
  • average scc

  • current scc
  • scc computed
  • low values
  • qualitative characterization
  • damage model

  • uncertain inputs
  • using probability
  • benefit estimates
  • scc frequency
  • relevant probability


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